How to Organise Purchase Requests Before They Become POs

Quick answer: To organise purchase requests, give them one front door: a single purchase request form that every department uses, with a short list of fields that must be filled before anyone looks at it. Ask for what is needed, why, how many, the estimated cost, when it is needed, which department pays and any preferred supplier, and attach quotes or specifications. Requests that arrive any other way get a friendly reply pointing to the form, not a purchase.

The problem: requests arrive from everywhere, half-finished

In many small and mid-sized organisations, a purchase request is whatever someone sends: a WhatsApp message saying "we need toner", an email with a photo of a quotation, a remark in a management meeting.

Each one starts a chain of questions. Which toner? How many? Is there budget? Needed today or next month? By the time the answers arrive, the original message is buried in a chat thread, and nobody can say later who asked for what, or why.

This matters for more than tidiness:

• Time. Every missing detail adds another round of messages before anyone can approve or buy. We look at the whole journey to a purchase order (PO) in The Procurement Process Step by Step.
• Budget. If a request does not say which department or budget line it belongs to, nobody can check whether money is available before committing to a supplier.
• Control and audit. Purchasing guidance for US county governments, from the University of Tennessee's County Technical Assistance Service, describes the requisition as the formal request that starts a purchase and notes that one of its main purposes is to provide a record that can be inspected and audited. A chat message rarely does that.

The solution: one front door and a complete request

1. Choose one channel and name it

Pick one place where purchase requests are made: a paper form, a shared spreadsheet or a form in your procurement software. The value is not the tool; it is that every request lands in the same queue, in the same format, and stays there.

Internal control guidance points the same way. The US Government Accountability Office's standards (known as the Green Book) expect transactions to be completely and accurately recorded from initiation through to final records, and documented in a way that is readily available for examination. A single intake channel is the simplest way to make sure every request is recorded from the start.

2. Make a short list of fields mandatory

A request is complete when the buyer can act on it without asking a question; the table below lists what that usually means. Keep the list short: every extra mandatory field is a reason to go back to WhatsApp.

3. Ask for attachments, not descriptions of attachments

If someone already has a quotation, specification or drawing, the request should carry the document itself. The same county guidance notes that detailed specifications may need to go as a separate attachment to the requisition. An attachment ends the "can you forward me that quote?" message before it starts.

4. Separate who asks from who approves and who buys

The person who raises a request should not normally be the person who approves it and places the order. The Green Book describes segregation of duties as splitting authorising, processing and recording, reviewing, and handling the related assets among different people, so that no one person controls all key parts of a transaction. Where that is not practical because of limited staff, it calls for alternative controls instead; in a small team, that could mean a manager reviewing the month's requests and orders afterwards. A structured request makes either approach workable, because every request has a named requester and a visible approval.

5. Do not process off-process requests, but say so kindly

This is the rule that makes the rest work. If the procurement officer quietly completes a WhatsApp request "just this once", the form becomes optional. The reply should be helpful, quick and the same every time. For example:

"Thanks, happy to help with this. Please raise it on the purchase request form so it gets to the right approver. You can attach the quote you sent me."

Agree the exceptions in advance (genuine emergencies, for example) and require those requests to be entered on the form afterwards, so the record is still complete.

6. Introduce the rule properly

• Get the sign-off first. The managing director or finance lead should announce the rule, not procurement alone.
• Give a start date and a grace period. For two weeks, accept old-style requests but reply with the form link each time.
• Explain the benefit to requesters and show the form at a department meeting: complete requests move faster.
• Review after a month. Drop any field nobody uses and clarify any field people keep getting wrong.

What a purchase request must include

Copy this table into your own procedure and adjust it. The field list draws on the items the county guidance says a requisition should contain; the "why" column is our explanation.

All names, items and naira amounts above are illustrative.

If a request is missing a mandatory field, send it back with a short note on what is missing. Do not fill the gap yourself from memory.

How RequisitionPro helps

You can run all of this on paper or a spreadsheet; the hard part is keeping it consistent as volume grows. Here is how the RequisitionPro requisition form maps to the difficulties above.

Difficulty: requests arrive in different formats. In RequisitionPro every requisition goes through the same four-step form: Basic Info, Items, Attachments, and Review. The benefit is that procurement and approvers see every request in the same shape.

Difficulty: key details are missing. Required fields are marked with an asterisk, and the form flags any that are empty before the request can move on. On the Basic Info step the required fields are requisition title, category, department, priority and justification; required date and description are optional fields on the same step. On the Items step each line needs an item name, quantity and unit price, and the total price is calculated for you. The benefit is that the questions in the table above are answered before the request reaches an approver.

Difficulty: people abandon long forms. Once a request has a title, a department and at least one named item, you can save it as a draft with the Save Draft button, and the form saves a draft automatically when you move from Items to the Attachments step. A draft can be opened and edited later, so someone who needs to check a part number can come back to the request instead of starting again.

Difficulty: quotes and specifications live in inboxes. The Attachments step accepts supporting documents, quotes and specifications as PDF, Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, up to 10 MB per file. The benefit is that the evidence stays with the request through approval.

RequisitionPro does not pull requests in from email or chat. The "one front door" is the requisition form itself, so the rule in step 5 still applies: point people to the form.

Where to see it: the section "Create your first requisition" in the onboarding guide walks through the four steps.

Related questions

Is a purchase request the same as a purchase requisition? In most organisations, yes. Both mean the internal request for permission to buy. It is different from a purchase order, which goes to the supplier after approval; see Purchase Requisition vs Purchase Order.

Should approvers accept requests that skip the form? No. Approving an off-process request tells everyone the form is optional. If approvals are slow, fix that separately; we cover common causes in Why Purchase Approvals Take Days.

Next step

Watch the short video "How to Create a Requisition" (1:49) on the tutorials page to see the four-step form from start to finish.